As someone whose self-professed taste in books is “very long bummers”, this feels like something I should have read ages ago. It’s been out for nearly ten years now, so I have seen both the hype cycle and the backlash and after reading it I understand each of them. It tells the story of a group of four friends from college: Malcolm (an architect), JB (an artist), Willem (an actor), and Jude (a lawyer). When we first meet them, just a few years after they’ve graduated, they’re all struggling to find their places in the world, striving for success while working to rise above their childhood demons. And no one has more childhood demons than Jude. This book has been called “trauma porn” as it relates to the life story Hanya Yanagihara creates for Jude, and it’s not an unfair criticism. However bad you think it could be, it’s worse. As a reader, I found the section in which Jude has been taken on the road by a quasi-parental figure who abuses him while claiming to love him (and does even worse than that), ping-ponging around the country in a series of motels, to be reminiscent of Lolita…but while Lolita leaves most of the actual crimes to the imagination and is narrated by the abuser, A Little Life brings it out into the open and is narrated by the abused. It’s shocking, and horrifying, and not even the most shocking and horrifying thing to be recounted in the book’s 800 pages. But it’s not all despair and unimaginable cruelty to children. Jude, and indeed all of his friends, find success. They find love. They have friendships that feel real, with periods of closeness and periods of estrangement. People care for each other and are kind to each other. They are happy sometimes, and sometimes not. Life is not just one thing, it’s lots of different things, often at the same time, and I feel like this novel captured that beautifully. That being said, I do agree with some of the criticism. The level of trauma visited upon Jude becomes almost numbing in its depth. There is a lot of aspirational lifestyle content that got repetitive (especially, for me, the food, which is something I tend to find boring to read about). I don’t think I could ever recommend this book to anyone. It needs just about every content warning possible. I can well understand why some people hate it. But I found it highly compelling and genuinely moving. ( )

If I could give more stars, I would. Instantly became one of my favorite books. The writing voice is so different from what I’m used to. It’s so raw and real and human. I bawled for so long during and after reading this. ( )

It took me almost a year to read, as I had to keep taking breaks... breaks from the heartbreak, the pain, the sorrow. But I am so glad I stuck with it; I absolutely loved it. Beautiful, emotional, heart-wrenching, unbearable... but ultimately, beautiful. ( )

This is a melodramatic portrayal of an emotionally damaged trial lawyer and his long-suffering array of fans. He's so beautiful, so talented, so rich, and so very very very very very very very very sad and insecure (but that doesn't interfere with his ability to be the best trial attorney out there!). His personal tragedies are more numerous than Job's. The book cover portrays a man weeping - I don't think he's weeping enough. The cover should be a picture of some martyred saint - Saint Sebastian with all the arrows would be perfect. The end plate could be a woodcut scene of a mob of Victorian men grieving and tearing their clothes.
I hung in there until the end - because after awhile the idea of finishing this thing was akin to summiting Everest. I did the same thing with the ridiculously bloated "And Ladies of the Club". I can proudly say I finished both of these books - but sweet Jebus, I'm never getting the time it took to read them back. ( )

While it’s not unusual for a book to make me cry, it is a little out of the norm for me to burst into tears when talking about a book—which is exactly what happened when I tried to explain this maudlin plot to my husband. This book should come with a warning: it’s melancholic and hard to read in places—everything horrible in a piteous life happens here. It’s Shakespearean tragic. But, it’s also one of the most beautiful stories of friendship I’ve ever read: real and reverent, forgiving and sacrificial, loyal and loving.

This is a decades-long, panoramic friendship saga of four college friends: JB, an indulgent, insecure, self-involved but, also, lovable artist; Willem, a charming, good-looking actor who’s fiercely protective and loyal; Malcolm, an architect who craves propriety and struggles with guilt and indecision; and Jude, an intensely private and serious litigator with an obscure, traumatic past. The story follows these friends passionately pursuing their dreams after college in NYC with the peaks and valleys of their friendship as the focal point of this narrative. While they see themselves as a unit, it’s really Jude at the center of it all, as the sun they all orbit around. However, Jude sees himself only as “an extravagant collection of problems,” even though everyone around him, everyone who gets pulled in as if by centripetal force, deeply desires to help him move past the extreme trauma of a childhood that has scarred him both physically and emotionally (392).

In this story of friendship and, ultimately, of love, it asks the question of whether or not love is enough to save someone—whether or not that person thinks they’re worthy of being saved. If my previous warnings of trauma don’t scare you off, I highly recommend this lit-fic read. Other than being a little too long and having too many terrible things happen to these characters—some more than others, some of Job-like proportions, moving it from reality to something more mythic, too incredulous to believe—it really is a beautiful story of friendship and love that’s worth all 720 pages, a 4.5 star read. ( )